It's not all about me.... but to start us off, it is ....all about me .

 Who am I ?   John Modra 0488 219 252  email johnlmodra.blogspot.com

Next to my wife, I like my chainsaw and welder best.  As an ecosystem risk and resilience planner, I love to saw apart the physical and chemical components of soil water plant and biological competition and cooperation in order to understand and reintegrate them into managed sustainability actions when reunited .
One of the biggest challenges we face as communities is to find a new consensus about conservation and how to do it so that it actually works 
 ARC ( The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship ) has asserted that this critical quest is NOT a job for dilatants, and I agree wholeheartedly. This is not to deny the important role of observers and other participants but to show how role of those who actually have proved themselves capable by study and effective work in an area can help us all move on with genuine workable agendas, 
The public service and political parties too must again insist on competence, recognising the immaturity and noise , ignorance self serving blinkereness and cancelling of  voices.Its a huge task to listen and t listen well enough to respond with sustainability in mind , 
One of my ambitions in aligning with ARC is to see us bring a bigger and broader consensus to sound conservation and earth resource use.
Conservation isn't just dreaming, but is a complex way of working with nature which actually works.Despite failures in the past our forebears did quite a lot of that, because they lived in and with nature. The challenge remains for US to do it better and to do it with a more complete view of how things work in the world. 

Our children deserve to inherit processes on conservation of natural resources that work, not the ones pressed on us by quick fix ignorant and arrogant  political and economic forces ; Conservation doesn't mean preservation (assuming things will all run out) but it does mean managing the recycling processes in nature so they are given room to work naturally , That means we only need to worry and concentrate on the few processes of degradation that occur and how to stop them , The media will constantly dream up  new worries, fears that result in irrational unreasonable concerns and solutions- if we watch them' 

It's up to the new media like the net to dismiss the wannabes and legacy medias desperate attempts to retain power and influence over us.

If natural systems they are not undertood, managed and recycled well, the stresses on our communities and the loss of resilience will all grow 

IMO  what should ARC aim to encourage ? From my experience and using ARC's grand circle of competencies 

1. A bigger and broader consensus in conservation in the face of current unresolved conflicts and confusion in earth resource planning. 

Inept and incompetent meddling by political parties in the complex challenges of natural resource use is not resolved while those parties fund one favored research interest over another.

Funding for the needed concrete decision making should be coming from independent and integrating sources. the broad competency of the later integrator is often lost by political lobbying for particular popular or well funded  individual interest components.

In Australia we call the preoccupation with one popular ecological element (such as cuddly animals ) and the neglect of the others or the more ordinary (say soils) the "trumped up parrot/koala syndrome".  

This deficiency was anticipated by a great scientist educator nearly 100 years ago. One of my many blogs uses his famous phrase  ( http://misplacedconcreteness.blogspot.com ) 


In summary : Correlation is not causation and yet too much caution will set the country in concrete and not enough how to and risk assesment will do the same. As Os Guiness said some time ago The West has gone East and its will has become frozen as a result. 

2. A revival of more effective teaching and training places, including  in the Arts 

---As a practical decision maker involved in a wide range of landscapes and land uses over 3 decades, I have seen the disintegration of competence and confidence in making sound risk management decisions on the environment.  I welcome JB Peterson's focus on new ways to develop universities competency and mentorship in practice.  Mentorship is still common in medicine ( an aligned profession) but not amongst environmental planning practitioners. This cannot remain so, or the West will fall into a hole. Where risk is real, so is the need for real trustworthiness and competence - not the legacy media who survive on little else now but fear.  

--I share ARCs concern that far too many dependants on the tax take have suspect research and practice programs.

Many groups get away with this incompetence because conservation theory and ecological constraint science and experience is in its infancy in many particularly non regional testing grounds. Project preoccupants by accountants and finance managers has driven many competent people away from effective contributions. This in itself is an extremely serious matter for the public service in particular.   

--Responsible citizenship should mean more trust is given to trained people and less to projects and the accounting processes which often vainly attempt to manage them. Constant monitoring by the bureau can be just  misplaced meddling .  

--We field effectives could have a stronger role in reducing this often institutional constraint if countries increased regional accountability. Improving regional accountability by reforming democratic processes (point 5 ) is a preoccupation of mine http://thiselection.blogspot.com.  

--The  skills and expertise of lots of former public servants are not readily available to students.   New media could encourage our senior and other elder citizens to seek and train young people by being mentors through a more transparent net and public broadcasting opportunities of community TV being made available to them ( Our ABC have three TV channels)  .

--I greatly welcome Kisin's approach because I too have always believed decisions about participating in that the complex web of connections that is life, can  often be best approached, not by the long winded pedantic point to point progress methods but through art, analogy, comedy and phenomenology. One of my own creations is Middle Earth mind readers ( Facebook)

3.Democratic and decision making process reforms- particularly more effective regional representation.

 No sound student of British and American history can ignore the huge historical costs of gaining satisfactory forms of representation for all the people in a nation or profession . Why should some parties think we have finished in this long struggle to get a good balance between the powerful and the producers, the city and the country, the hardworking and the dependents and so on ; The struggle to get better representation is a great aim that we could make an ambition of ARC 

Internet groups I run 

Nerds in the know 

Real World Risk Managers

Middle Earth mind readers 

Worth watching

Representing South West Victoria  

My most common publishing places ( including all the ones listed above on blogspot.com )

cuttingedgecare

designwithnature

soilsstuff

ecomia 

yesminister 

politicaceleste

progressin